WISH

There’s this game I like to play to collapse time when it feels like the drive to our house in Germany is taking forever. Honestly, there’s only so long that the hills supposedly being alive with the sound of music is entertaining enough to fill a six-hour drive. When I play this game, I imagine coming into the village through the roundabout (remember that time Mam drove into it the wrong way after coming back from Ireland, and we couldn’t figure out why it felt so wrong??), past the macabre lineup of a geriatric hospital, a retirement home, and a cemetery (no one has been buried there since the 60s, but still, feels ominously efficient), before turning left and into our street.

No matter what time of year I play this game, I always picture the arrival at the end of a hot summer’s day, because I know how much you love to press your bare feet into the soft black tar between the cracks of the pavement as the sky turns purple, and the sun disappears behind the neighbour’s house. A new family moved into it a few years ago, by the way, and they finally got rid of all those trees. You wouldn’t believe how much space and light there is now, but it also means that with the witch house gone, we’re the last weird family left on the street. Or perhaps the others are just better at tucking their weird behind freshly painted walls and carefully gated front yards.

I imagine all this as I get into my silver Ford Focus at the beginning of my drive and set the volume on “Lust for Life” to loud. I wonder if the me right now and the version of me turning left at the petrol station and looking for a parking space exist at the same time.

I’m playing this game and asking myself the same question as I write these words to you now. Tears trickle down my cheeks and catch around the rim of my glasses as I think of you sitting on the bed in your room, the drawings of Detective Conan already taped to the glass inlay of your door for privacy, the walls still white (not the vibrant blue they are now) and I wonder: Are you thinking about me? Are we thinking of each other right now?

If you are, then I have some important things I desperately want to say to you.

Things I wish someone had said to you sooner.

And before you get your hopes up: no, this is not a “Back to the Future Part II” situation, and I’m not the kind of future self that has valuable investment advice to give you. Except, maybe stop cutting the heads off of your Barbies and wait for the summer of 2023 for an opportunity to sell them. Trust me on this.